


The Everyday Things

by saintroux



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2017-2018 NHL Season, Adventures in Russia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Miscommunication, Multi, Offseason Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-27 23:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17776682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintroux/pseuds/saintroux
Summary: “Um, hello?” Sid said on the other side of the line, his voice soft and scratchy through the phone.  It was a strange sound to hear; Zhenya hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. “Geno? I’m sorry I’m calling so early but I—I’m at the airport—I’m in Moscow, or, well, somewhere around there.”





	The Everyday Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [witblogi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/witblogi/gifts).



> apologies in advance to my recipient that i took your rather lighthearted prompt and let it run a little wild on me. but the part that resonated with me the most is at the heart of this story, and i hope that resonates for you too! 
> 
> 7100 thank yous to sevenfists for the beta-- for helping me parse what everyone was feeling, and making sure that i didn't get lost in the weeds.
> 
> housekeeping note- i played fast and loose with international travel procedures here. even though the process by which someone can come and stay in russia is not so easily spontaneous in real life, we are handwaving it for this story because a) i didn't have the time to delve into that while writing and keep everything about it kosher and up to par in narrative and b) i'm the author and i do what i want! feel free to pretend that this is a better world in which people can travel where they want at will and visa laws don't exist. also, i mucked a little with the general timelines of everyone's summer activities to fit my needs. an au of summer 2018.

Zhenya woke up to the sound of Anya’s ringtone, the familiar buzzing going on and on. He slit his eyes open, and it was probably still early, the sun just barely peeking in through their dark bedroom curtains. Who on earth was calling this early? Surely they could call again later, or leave a message. Anya needed to learn to sleep with her phone on silent. Zhenya was old now; he needed his rest. 

But Anya wasn’t in the room, and her phone went off again shortly after, buzzing around on the tabletop. Zhenya rolled over, grumbling as he grabbed for it.

“Hello?” he asked, groggy and irritated. 

“Um, hello?” Sid said on the other side of the line, his voice soft and scratchy through the phone. It was a strange sound to hear; Zhenya hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. “Geno? I’m sorry I’m calling so early but I—I’m at the airport—I’m in Moscow, or, well, somewhere around there.” 

Zhenya shook his head. Was he hearing things? He lifted the blankets off and swung himself out of bed, pacing over to the window. It was brighter outside than he had thought; maybe he had slept in. “Sid?” he said. He felt at a loss. Sid was in Moscow? Was this a joke?

“Yeah, it’s me,” Sid said, and stopped talking into the mouthpiece for a moment. Zhenya could hear him in the background, trying to order something in painfully stilted Russian, barely forming the correct words, his pronunciation awful. Probably he was using a lot of hand gestures, since Zhenya knew for a fact that his vocabulary included maybe twenty words. “Sorry, I uh—“ he continued, “sorry I didn’t let you know, but. Can you give me your address? I got to the taxi stand and realized I didn’t have it, and, well—I thought maybe it would be weird if I just showed up at your door.” 

“Weird, yes—“ Zhenya said. He felt like maybe he was dreaming, and he paced into the bathroom and stood staring at his own reflection, and pinched himself on the arm, wincing when it felt just like it always did. Fuck. “Not weird you just show up at airport, though? Call me, like, oh, hello Geno, how are you?” 

“Well, I—“ Sid said, “yeah, I guess that’s true.” He trailed off, and Zhenya let the awkward silence stretch between them for a moment, big and gaping. Zhenya felt shell-shocked and a little irritated. Was this just a game? Why had Sid been so cagey and uncertain before? Zhenya wanted to let go of all of his bubbling heartbreak and feel relief and excitement, but it was hard when there was so much that he didn’t know. 

“We come get you,” Zhenya said, because even if he was hurt, it was good to be generous, and maybe this _had_ been the plan all along and Sid just hadn’t told him because Zhenya had been so busy ignoring him. Maybe Zhenya would feel terribly silly and embarrassed about all of the invented agony of it, and all would be forgotten.

“You don’t need to,” Sid said, and spoke again away from the phone. “It’s not—I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“No,” Zhenya said; he had made up his mind. “We come. Stay there, read book. Don’t talk to any taxi.” Sid’s Russian vocabulary was made up mostly of curse words he’d picked up on the ice, and knowing him, he would botch it and get himself ridiculously lost. He had always been awful with directions, even in English. 

Zhenya hung up the phone and went to collect Anya, who looked at him like he had grown three heads. “He’s where?” she said, disbelieving, her hands slipping a little where she was holding Nikita against her hip. “I never would have expected him to be the type to try this kind of excessive surprise. You, definitely, but—” 

“Never is a long time, I guess,” Zhenya said, and scrubbed his own hands over his face, taking Anya’s steaming coffee mug off the counter and downing the rest of it in record time. He still couldn’t believe it himself, and pinched himself on the hip again on his way to get dressed. 

“Let’s talk about this later,” Sid had said, when Zhenya asked him to spend the summer together. Zhenya had weeks of opened and unanswered texts from Sid on his phone that he had been too hurt and stubborn to reply to. But Sid was here now, only thirty kilometers away instead of thousands. Maybe all of it had just been a really bad dream.

///

Sid was at Sheremetyevo. Zhenya drove there like a madman, faster than he had since before Nikita was born, zipping through the city’s outer rings, under traffic tunnels and out to Leningradskoye Highway, which would take them most of the way.

When they got into the airport complex, Zhenya’s breathing quickened and he felt suddenly nervous, unsure how this should go. Should they all go in together? Should he text Sid from the arrivals lot? Maybe he could just send Anya in alone, who was much more outwardly calm, and hadn’t been stubbornly avoiding Sid’s overtures for the past five weeks. It might be nice for him to see her first, to temper things. 

“Maybe you can go in alone,” Zhenya told her, when they pulled into the lot and turned off the car. “I’ll stay out here with Nikita, he can text you what claim he’s in.” 

Anya fixed him with a narrow-eyed stare. “Zhenya, c’mon,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and then Zhenya’s and leaning over the middle console into the backseat to see if Nikita was awake. “Let’s go, it’s not polite to leave him waiting.” 

“He left me waiting all month,” Zhenya said, unkindly, and then regretted it a little. He had done it to himself, a little, a product of his own stubbornness. They were both to blame. 

Anya scooped Nikita out of his car seat and fussed with his sweatshirt until he was curled up on her shoulder and she could carry him comfortably inside. Zhenya walked along behind them, sweating even more than the balmy July heat warranted. Would Sid be happy to see them? Well, probably he would be, or why else would he have come? 

Sid was leaning against his suitcase and his gear bag in baggage claim, typing away at his phone. Zhenya’s gaze swiped up and down his bare calves and his stupid long-sleeved tee and he tried to school his mouth into an even line, to tuck his emotions inside where Sid would never see them and Anya couldn’t sniff them out. When they got close enough, it was Nikita who betrayed them, yelping and squirming in Anya’s arms when he realized who it was. Sid looked up at them and smiled, tentative and small at first, and then wider. 

“Hey,” he said, pocketing his phone. He looked just as he had when Zhenya and Anya had left Pittsburgh in May. 

Anya went to him first, shifting Nikita to one hip and reaching out with her free arm to pull Sid into a hug, the kind of hug you gave to close friends, easy and innocuous. Zhenya hung back, watching Anya kiss both his cheeks in turn and Nikita wind his small chubby arms around the near side of Sid's head. 

“Hey, buddy,” Sid said, when he pulled back, smiling that big, infectious smile at Nikita and ruffling his hair under his hood. “Miss me?” 

Zhenya's heart beat loudly, rattling around inside his chest. He felt awkward standing back, lingering like a stranger, unsure of how to move his feet. But when Sid looked at him over Anya’s shoulder and smiled, Zhenya folded, and went forward, tentatively wrapping one arm over Sid’s shoulder, gingerly patting him on the back. Only the cacophonous sounds of the airport terminal stopped him from tucking his face into the warm curve of Sid’s neck, where he smelled like airplane air and deodorant, the familiar background of Zhenya’s daily life. 

“Hi,” Sid said, when Zhenya pulled himself away. His face looked tired. Zhenya breathed in—and out.

They walked out to the car together and Zhenya hung back, watching Sid and Anya silently fall into step. 

“How is flight?” Anya asked, once they’d piled everyone and all of Sid’s bags back into the car. Sid was sprawled out a little in the back, one arm hooked over the top of Nikita’s car seat. Zhenya could see him through the rearview mirror, and he tried not to catch Sid’s eye. “It’s long? We surprise you come.” 

“It was fine, yeah—I lucked out and got the empty seat, so not too bad, you know?” Sid said. “Training back in Pittsburgh got all screwed up and I was already in England so I thought, well—“

“Maybe you text next time, give warning,” Zhenya said, feeling his renewed hopes crumble at Sid’s weird, casual excuse. He took a heavy turn onto the highway ramp, keeping his gaze straight ahead. He could feel Anya giving him the stink eye from the passenger seat, like she thought she could turn him to ash, which wasn’t entirely false. 

“We glad you here,” Anya said, emphasizing it, like she knew that Zhenya wanted to be unkind. And Zhenya was glad in a way, of course he was. He wanted nothing more than for Sid to _want_ to come to Moscow with them every summer, to _want_ to share a piece of their life here. But overlying that, he just felt frustrated—frustrated with Sid’s caginess and how Zhenya could never truly understand what he was thinking or feeling, could only think the worst and assume.

“I’m glad I’m here too,” Sid said, and when Zhenya glanced back at him again in the rearview mirror, his face was tense, but he was smiling.

///

Zhenya dropped Sid’s bags in the front hall and then scurried away into the shower, where he stood facing the wall, reading the soap labels and thinking about Sid’s expression looking back at him, the tense lines around his mouth. He tried to calm his heart rate to a reasonable level; there was no sense in letting himself get keyed up over it anymore. Sid was here, in Zhenya and Anya’s home, just like Zhenya had asked him to be. Maybe he wouldn’t ever understand Sid’s motivations, but it was time for Zhenya to put the past in the past.

Anya was sitting at the breakfast bar when Zhenya came out from the shower, scrolling through something on Zhenya’s tablet. 

“Could you not drip all over the tile for once?” Anya said, not even turning to look at him. He hated the scratch of a towel against his skin, and had gotten enough weird rashes in his first few years in the NHL that he preferred to drip dry now, and often wandered around in half damp sweatpants until the job was done, much to Anya’s chagrin. 

He slid onto the stool next to her. “If you fall and crack your head open, you’ll have only yourself to blame,” she said. 

He rolled his eyes. “I’m fine, Nyusha,” he said, bringing a hand up to rub at her neck and upper back, digging in a little between her shoulders where her muscles were always tight. “Where is Sid?” 

“He’s sleeping,” Anya said, and pulled away from Zhenya’s attempts to soothe and turned to face him, swiveling in her chair. “Or I told him to sleep, anyway. He has the baby with him; he should be fine.” 

“Oh, you’re not worried that _he’s_ going to roll over on him, then?” Zhenya asked, because Anya was forever reminding him that he might, every time he took Nikita into their room for his afternoon nap. 

“Well he’s much more careful than you, for one,” Anya said. “You didn’t have to be so cruel to him.” 

“Cruel? Really?” Zhenya would admit that perhaps he wasn’t as welcoming as he would have been under better circumstances, but he didn’t think he was being _cruel_. All he needed was time. Maybe it would be awkward now in a way that their relationship hadn’t been in a very long time, but it would be okay. He would figure out a way for it to be okay.

“I know you’re unhappy with him, Zhenya,” Anya said. She slid off of her chair and stood behind Zhenya’s, hooking her arms around his neck, draping herself over his back. “I know you wanted him to say yes, but he’s here now—it’s okay to forgive him.” 

“He didn’t come because he wanted to,“ Zhenya said, defensive of his hurt feelings. Sid had made it pretty obvious that there were a lot of little things about Zhenya’s life and worldview that he didn’t particularly like, and Zhenya had hoped maybe all those things would just smooth out with time, that Sid would come around, that Zhenya was maybe just overreacting. But he hadn’t wanted to spend the summer with them, and now he was only here because— “You heard him, Anya—he’s only here because his plans got fucked up. I don’t know why he—“ 

He felt frustrated that Anya couldn’t see it. She’d always given Sid so much leeway, let him be cautious and slow with them, not put up much of a fuss when he insisted that he needed to keep living at his own house. Did she think they had all of eternity to make things how they wanted them? That even if it took Sid ten more years to come around, that everything would be okay? It was clear that Zhenya knew him better. 

“You know that we’re not the only important thing in his life,” Anya said, which was _fine_ , sure—but maybe Zhenya wanted them to be the most important, sometimes. “Just give him a chance.” She kissed the back of his neck once and untangled herself, walking off into the kitchen and turning on the tap. Zhenya supposed that was the end of that conversation, then, no matter how much he wanted to keep needling her. 

Zhenya could see right through her. She would tell him not to fret, but he knew that inside she harbored similar concerns. She loved to put up a strong face when something was bothering her, as though maybe whatever was concerning her wouldn’t hurt if she frowned at it enough. In that, they were two peas in a pod. 

But maybe it was time to give Sid a chance—maybe Zhenya _was_ reading the signs all wrong, like Anya seemed to think he was, and Sid would spend this whole vacation embracing their life, and embracing Russia, and they would all come out of it stronger than ever, no harm done. 

Zhenya didn’t think so, but he could try.

///

Sid stayed asleep all morning and into the afternoon, until the air conditioning got so cold that Zhenya needed to grab a sweatshirt from the bedroom, and Sid began to stir awake as Zhenya was closing the closet doors.

“Hey,” Sid said, voice still tinged with the cottony rasp of sleep. Zhenya turned around with the sweatshirt clutched in his fists, sweaty from nerves. Sid was alone in their giant bed, his pale feet tangled in Zhenya’s favorite throw. 

“Hi,” Zhenya replied. He walked a few steps closer and then hovered there awkwardly, unsure of what to do or say. Sid’s arrival had caught him wholly by surprise, and he had still been working through the various stages of his grief. He didn’t know what to think now that the circumstances had shifted. “Nap was okay?” he asked, because it seemed safe.

“Eh, I’ve had better,” Sid said. “Bed is nice, though.” He shrugged a little, sitting up and slithering out from under the covers. He was wearing nothing but his unbuttoned shorts. Zhenya was only now noticing his shirt discarded on the rug by the door. 

Half of Zhenya wanted to go immediately to him, climb onto the bed and sink into his thick, appealing body that Zhenya knew would be warm from sleep. He wanted to think about the last time that they’d all been together, naked in Sid’s bed at his house, still damp from the pool. But instead all he could think about was Sid’s uncomfortable face on that last spring morning, the way he’d looked back down at the paper’s daily headline, and dropped the subject, and left soon after. 

Zhenya wasn’t ready to talk to him about it. But he didn’t know what else to talk about. “How you summer?” he asked, knowing full well that Sid had been wandering around Europe for the better part of the month, judging by the photos on Zhenya’s phone. He sat gingerly down on the edge of the mattress, carefully aware of where they weren’t touching. 

“It’s been good,” Sid said, folding his legs under him and scratching a hand through his hair, mussing it up. Zhenya resisted the urge to reach out and smooth it down again. “You’ve been to Switzerland, right? I got to skate some in Davos. It was—” He trailed off then, and smiled weakly at Zhenya through one side of his mouth. Zhenya had known him for many years; he knew just how it was. 

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment before Sid spoke again. “How was—” he began, “how has yours been? You guys do anything fun, or?” It felt not unlike talking to an acquaintance, someone he might run into at the grocery store some morning and exchange pleasantries with. Zhenya’s heart ached, a thick, throbbing weight in his chest. 

“We do same,” Zhenya said, “Go to Miami, see parents. We go fishing a lot. Nikita still too small to hold rod, but maybe next year.” He flexed his hands in the sheets, gripping them and ungripping them. He looked back at Sid, whose smile was small and hopeful and unsure. 

A second later, Anya came down the hall. “Can you ask Sid if he wants to go out tonight or if he would rather eat in?” she called, from a short distance, and then cut herself off when she appeared in the doorway and switched into English. “Oh, sorry Sid,” she said. “Hope you sleep well.” 

“I did, thanks,” Sid replied. His smile for Anna was distinctly more sunny. 

“Come out when you ready,” she said, and took the hair tie from her wrist and scraped her hair up into a fat bun. “We do dinner, whatever you want.”

“For sure,” Sid said. They both watched her as she left, down the other end of the hall. Sid turned back to Zhenya, and Zhenya swallowed. His tongue felt thick with uncertainty. 

“Glad you here, Sid,” he said, because it was true. Zhenya had perhaps been harboring a hidden hope for the past few weeks that Sid was making his way here in secret, roaming through Europe the long way, some grand, romantic surprise. Those hopes had been foolish, only daydreams. But Sid _was_ here now, regardless of his reasons, and Zhenya was glad. 

Sid’s hand grazed Zhenya’s arm as Zhenya stood from the bed. “Me too,” Sid said, and smiled sweet, like he meant it. “I’m glad.”

///

Zhenya made a list of all of the touristy things he could think of, anything that anyone who had visited him had ever wanted to do, all of the highlights, and presented it to Sid the next morning over breakfast, sliding his phone across the counter.

“We don’t have to do all of this stuff,” Sid said, scrolling through Zhenya’s suggestions. “I’m sure you’ve seen all of it, it’s really not—“ 

“It’s fine, we can do—“ Zhenya said, snatching his phone back. Why was Sid resisting? Didn’t he come here to see things? Surely they wouldn’t sit inside all day twiddling their thumbs. 

They all took the metro to Red Square, because it was the easiest thing that Zhenya could think of, and the place that nearly everyone wanted to see. Zhenya had lived in Moscow now for nearly a decade and still he was sometimes taken aback by the crowds and the candy-bright colors of the domes of St. Basil’s against the blue summer sky. 

When they got out of the train at Teatralnaya, Sid wouldn’t stop looking around, curious, Zhenya supposed, about the unfamiliar stonework and domed ceilings inside the tunnels. There were a number of chandeliers hung along the corridors and porcelain figures carved into the marble. Zhenya supposed that there really wasn’t anything like this back in Pittsburgh. 

Anya smiled at him as they lingered behind Sid, who was taking pictures with his phone. “He seems to like it,” she said, and nudged him as if to add what she wouldn’t say. That Zhenya was being too harsh and fussy, that all of his worries were just in his head. 

Sid wanted to go to the Historical Museum, which Zhenya should have figured. Zhenya had never been inside, because the security process was tedious, and none of his friends had ever cared much for history. 

“Let me lead,” Anya said, once they had all passed through security and were lingering around in the lobby. Sid was still taking pictures with his phone, waiting for a group of Georgian tourists to pass by so he could look at the details on one of the doorways. “You’re hopeless, we’ll spend all day in here.” 

Zhenya got put on baby duty, and he followed Anya and Sid around the halls of the museum, Nikita’s carrier attached to his chest. Most of the signage was exclusively in Russian, to Zhenya’s surprise, and he needed to translate a lot of it for Sid to understand, fill in the gaps where Anya was still unsure of her English. 

“So did people really use these back then?” Sid asked, gesturing to some odd-looking metal device that Zhenya had never seen before and knew nothing about. “Seems impractical. Do you know what they’re for?” 

“Don’t know, maybe they use—probably, since in museum,” Zhenya said. If Sid wanted to know so much he should have picked up the self-guided audio tour. Zhenya was no expert. 

They lingered for a while at a display of some 16th-century book, hand-printed and adorned with ornate floral designs. “Maybe we’ll read this to you next, Nikita,” Anya said, leaning in to fuss with his hair as he reached toward it.

“He likes it, eh?” Sid asked, coming up on Zhenya’s other side. Zhenya could feel Sid’s hand hover for a moment near the small of his back and then drift away.

Nikita started to get fussy not long after, squirming around in his carrier. Zhenya put a hand on his head to hold him closer to his chest. “Shhh, we’ll leave soon, Nikitka,” he said, bouncing him a little as they walked through the back half of another room, this one filled with mostly pottery. 

“Do you want me to take him?” Sid asked, as they wound their way toward the exits. Zhenya glanced around, a little nervous that someone might recognize them, and find it odd that Zhenya’s coworker was here on vacation and toting around his child. Well, maybe their ire was only in his head. They would head home soon, and hopefully everyone in the square and on the metro would be too absorbed in their own lives to think much about it. 

Anya helped him unstrap the carrier, and reattached it to Sid, who held firmly onto Nikita until it was fully secured, chattering away to him in English, directing Nikita’s attention to the beautiful scenery all around them. 

Zhenya felt himself flush all over, watching Sid carrying Nikita through their walk back to the train, pointing and gesturing at things, laughing with Anya when Nikita became fixated on a large bird sitting near the metro entrance and had to stop and look at it for at least four minutes until it fluttered its wings and flew away. 

Sid had always loved Nikita and was endlessly good with him, playing with him for hours on the floor of Zhenya and Anya’s living room, watching NHL Network with Nikita curled up on his lap, even though Zhenya knew that Nikita could barely understand a word. It was one of Zhenya’s favorite things about him, but also part of what made Zhenya so wary. It was clear that Nikita thought of Sid as—not really as a father figure, but certainly as someone important. He loved to watch videos of Sid on the tablet, smacking at his likeness on the screen, and when Anya had taken him to practice, he’d yelped and yelped at the both of them, demanding an endless number of high fives. 

Nikita was still young, certainly, and these memories would fade, if it came to that. Zhenya really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. 

“How you like?” Zhenya asked, on the train back home. Zhenya had bought Sid a guidebook on the Imperial Russian Army at the gift shop on the way out, in hopes of encouraging his interest in the subject. “You want to go more? Many place to see here.”

“It was nice,” Sid said, a bland platitude if Zhenya had ever heard one. He had seemed interested in the moment, certainly. “Maybe one is enough for now, though. We don’t have to run around and see everything all at once. Maybe next week, eh?” 

Zhenya prickled. He had made the list of things to do thinking that Sid would be excited, at the very least, and they could share in the vast, colorful history of Russia together—all four of them—and Sid would come to see it the way Zhenya did: as a beautiful and beloved home. 

What good was it if he didn’t want to dig deeper, if he only wanted to skim the very surface of it, or of Zhenya and Anya themselves? 

But Zhenya didn’t want to give up.

///

One of the neighbor’s daughters came over to babysit Nikita that night, and Zhenya went with Anya and Sid to dinner, back in the center of the city at some upscale restaurant that Zhenya thought left a nice impression. He was never certain of what Sid liked, because he wouldn’t give much opinion on it. Everything was ‘fine,’ or he was ‘open to it.’ It infuriated Zhenya to literally no end.

“What you want?” Zhenya asked him, poring over the menu trying to decide. Anya would eat whatever he ordered, but Sid he wasn’t so sure. 

“You pick,” Sid said. He hadn’t even opened his menu. “I’ll follow your lead.” Zhenya only narrowly resisted rolling his eyes. Sid was such a liar. Zhenya knew he had opinions, and he wouldn’t let Zhenya know any of them at all, just spend the next hour picking at his food, or shove something off onto Zhenya’s plate when he thought Zhenya wasn’t looking. 

When the waiter came back around, Zhenya still hadn’t made up his mind, and he ordered a horrifying mishmash of small plates, things he wanted and things he thought were bland enough for Sid’s North American palate. Surely he couldn’t complain about _potatoes_.

Another waiter brought around two bottles of wine, one white and one red. “I didn’t order this,” Zhenya said, after he’d gone away. 

“I order,” Anya said in English, presumably for Sid’s benefit. “I know you want, but you forget. Drink.” She poured them all generous glasses, red for herself and for Sid and white for Zhenya. It was sweet, which Zhenya liked. Anya had much more sophisticated taste in wine than he did and loved to tease him about it, but he was grateful that she’d ordered his favorite for him without so much as a word. He was already feeling keyed up about dinner, and whether Sid was enjoying himself, and everything. Drinking would be a requirement. 

“I had a nice time today,” Sid said, after taking a long sip of his own wine. The deep color of it stained his lips and teeth a little. Zhenya wanted to reach over and wipe it away. 

“Good,” Zhenya said, because at least that was _something_. “Maybe next we go to mall, easy place. You want to see show? Maybe Ksenia gets us tickets.” He wanted to keep Sid busy, to show him the real highlights of the city, everything that might wow him, and get him to see Zhenya and Anya's home in a favorable light. Perhaps Sid was still tired from travelling, but he knew that Sid usually loved to be out and about. 

“I told you that we really don’t need to—“ Sid said. His knees brushed Zhenya’s knees under the table. “I’m happy to see the sights, I guess, but it’s not, I’m not here to see Russia, I’m here to see you. Russia isn't what it's about, you know?” He looked at Zhenya and then Anya, and then back down at his glass. 

Zhenya rankled. He _was_ Russia. Maybe it was easy for Sid to gloss over that when Zhenya was in America, and everything about them was just Pittsburgh. But they were more than just that, more than just their hockey season selves. He wanted Sid to come here and to love the country and the way they lived and ate, he wanted Sid to want to come back again and again. If he would just—if he would just love it, maybe Zhenya could stop worrying that Sid would stop loving _them_ someday, when Pittsburgh was no longer a part of their lives. 

“Maybe we can just do some, like, normal things,” Sid continued, looking mostly at Anya and not meeting Zhenya’s eyes. “Whatever you would do without me, you know? We can go skate or take Nikita to the park or like—I don’t care, just—anything is fine.” 

Zhenya felt wary of showing Sid the things he did every day, the humdrum parts of his summer life, for fear that maybe he wouldn’t like them, and then Zhenya would have to think about it all the time, every summer for the rest of his life. He could avoid the sights with ease, but he couldn’t stop going to his favorite cafe, or Sanduny, or the movie theater that he and Anya liked to go to on Sunday evenings, when it was rarely full and they could sit far in the back row and kiss in the dark. 

“Ilyusha invited us to Sochi this weekend, Zhenya,” Anya said to him, and then switched to English. “You want to see World Cup, Sid? We go to some game already, but more games in Sochi, if you want. Kovalchuk invites us.” 

“Um, sure,” Sid said, because he was predictable and could never say no to sports, or to Anya for that matter. “That might be fun.” He smiled at Anya, tight but genuine, and patted her briefly on the knee. It was clear that the problems that were between them weren’t between Sid and Anya, which was more than a little maddening, when Zhenya could do nothing but think about all of his many concerns. 

When their food came, Zhenya immediately began to rearrange everything, pushing plates around until all of the Sid-approved food was easily in reach. “Here,” Zhenya said, pointing to a plate of dumplings and another of grilled perch. “Eat this, you like.” 

“Anything’s fine,” Sid said, surveying the rest of the spread. Zhenya had ordered pickled herring, a few salads, a bowl of rassolnik, which was Anya’s favorite soup. “What’s that?” 

“Pickled tomato, you don’t like,” Zhenya said. “Eat dumpling, it’s potato.” 

“I’ve never even tried one, how do you know if I like it or not?” Sid said, even though he had never met a pickle that he couldn’t immediately dump onto Zhenya’s plate. 

“You aren’t his mother, Zhenya,” Anya scolded, spearing one of them with her fork and dumping it off on Sid’s plate. “There, try it.” 

Sid picked it up and put the whole giant mass of it in his mouth as if he were a schoolboy completing a dare. He was an idiot. Zhenya wanted to laugh at him very much when he had to cover his mouth to keep any juice from spraying out. He was making a sour face, as if he were chewing a whole lemon. 

“You like?” Zhenya asked, taking a big gulp of his wine, smirking and kicking at Sid’s foot under the table. 

“Maybe it’s not my favorite,” Sid admitted, and finished off the rest of his water and half of his wine. Anya was still laughing at him through her napkin. Zhenya fought down a surge of irritation. Was she trying to test him? To prove to him that all of these concerns were in his head? Was she trying to prove it to herself?

The rest of their meal passed relatively uneventfully. Sid finished the entire plate of vareniki before Zhenya could get a single one. Anya ate her soup, and kept refilling everyone’s wine. Overall, it went well, better than Zhenya had thought, maybe. Sid had been a good sport, even if Zhenya still couldn’t get a read on him.

They’d finished three whole bottles of wine between them by the time they left, and the three of them sloshed their way out the door and into the back seat of a cab. Zhenya felt hyper-awake while they stood there on the curb, holding Anya’s hand firmly in his own. On her other side was Sid, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket, looking off at something in the distance, the still lingering sunset over the city skyline.

“I had a nice time today,” Sid said, quiet, like he thought that Zhenya hadn’t believed him the first time and couldn’t think of anything more to say. He kept leaning more and more into Zhenya’s side, and Zhenya closed his eyes and thought about years earlier, back when all of this had been new, and the warm weight of Sid’s shoulder on Zhenya’s body had made him burn. By the time the cab pulled up at their building, his forearm was nearly in Zhenya’s lap. Zhenya was fairly certain that he hadn’t taken a single breath since they’d turned off of Tverskaya Street. 

The closeness didn’t last as they went up the elevator and into the apartment, Sid lingering behind Zhenya and Anya a little awkwardly as they said their thanks to the babysitter and scuttled everyone’s shoes into the coat closet in the front hall. 

Anya wandered down the hall to check on Nikita, leaving Zhenya and Sid standing in thick silence. “You tired?” Zhenya asked, for lack of anything better to say. Sometimes when he travelled halfway across the world all he wanted to do was sleep for a week. 

“I’m fine,” Sid said, shifting from foot to foot. “Could I uh—could I get some water actually?” He shrugged out of his jacket and went into the kitchen, propping himself up against the counter while Zhenya pulled a clean glass from the dishwasher and filled it under the tap. 

“Here,” Zhenya said, and watched Sid’s throat work as he swallowed the whole thing in one long go. He wanted to walk over and bury his face there, right where he knew was warmest, the space behind Sid’s jaw that always smelled like salt and cologne. His frustration and anxiety over everything had done nothing to temper how much he was attracted to Sid, and the wine at dinner had done even less, much to his chagrin. 

“I like that shirt on you,” Sid said. It was only a regular shirt—a soft white button-up that he’d worn a thousand times on the plane. He wasn’t sure what was so special about it. “You look good.” Sid stepped into his space, carefully—like he thought that Zhenya might spook. Well, maybe he would. In the background, Zhenya could hear Anya talking softly to Nikita, turning his white noise machine up a little, clicking the gate of his crib into place. 

“Let’s go to bed, Sid,“ Zhenya said, running his hand down Sid’s arm until it encircled Sid’s wrist. It was the first time that they’d so much as talked about touching in almost two months. Zhenya wasn’t sure that he could go it alone; he needed Anya as a buffer. “Anya comes soon.” 

“Oh, well if Anna’s coming,” Sid said, as he followed Zhenya out of the kitchen and down the hall. Zhenya could _hear_ his smirk, voice dripping with it; he was drunk and thought he was incredibly clever, even though it was patently untrue. 

Zhenya watched Sid peel his socks off and nearly trip over himself, and then let Sid push him down into the bed and kiss him, his sweaty palms bracketing Zhenya’s face. Zhenya hadn’t kissed him like this since May, and he licked greedily into Sid’s mouth, over the edges of his teeth. Their problems had never extended to the bedroom. 

Anya came in as Sid was unbuttoning Zhenya’s shirt—Zhenya’s eyes were closed but he heard her laugh and the click of her turning on the bedside lamp. “You like dark?” she asked. Zhenya cracked one eye open to watch her pace around the room, stripping off most of her clothes, leaving her underwear on and coming over to join them, flopping down next to them on the bed. 

“You wanna switch?” Sid asked her, running his hand up her arm to brush across her neck. 

“Mmm, no,” she said, and burrowed further into Zhenya’s side, her smooth, cool skin all along the edge of Zhenya’s body. “Keep going, maybe I need sleep.” 

“Don’t let us interrupt,” Zhenya said, laughing, as she turned her head and kissed his temple. She liked to do this to him sometimes, crawl into bed while Zhenya was deep into jerking off, smirk at him and kiss his arm and close her eyes. But Zhenya didn’t want that now, he wanted Anya here to bind them all together, the even-tempered glue that connected them. He wanted to put her between them, to touch her and look at Sid over the fluffy edges of her hair and maybe understand him a little more.

He was a little afraid of what he would say, just him and Sid—nervous confessions spilling out, unprepared. He needed to organize his thoughts before he said anything; he needed to get a better read on what Sid wanted, or really any read at all. 

Sid leaned down to kiss Anya goodnight, a long kiss with liberal tongue, the way Zhenya thought was probably their favorite, and then slumped down into the curve of Zhenya’s neck, his hands on Zhenya’s ribs under his open shirt, his breaths warm and stale. 

“Maybe we should follow her lead, eh?” Sid said, like he was reading Zhenya’s mind, like maybe he was nervous too. “I know I said I wasn’t tired, but—“ He yawned obnoxiously loudly, his mouth open enough that Zhenya could feel the soft scrape of Sid’s teeth against his jaw. “Rain check?” 

Sid kissed his jaw where he had set his teeth and then kissed Zhenya’s hair and his nose, his cheek, all the way back to his mouth. Zhenya held his breath to keep from exploding all over the room. Sid was so fucking _sweet_ sometimes, and Zhenya didn’t need to—he wanted to believe that this Sid would stay with them forever, but the thought of asking him to was terrifying. He would fight twenty times a season, he would block shots, anything—anything to keep from hearing no. 

“Okay,” Zhenya said, and kissed him back, thinking about kissing him years ago, when all of this first started. He wanted to feel hope like he had felt then, instead of fear. He wanted to know they had a future. “Rain check.”

///

They took a private plane to Sochi later on that week, with a bunch of the guys from the national team and everyone’s wives. Ilyusha raised his eyebrows at Zhenya when he and Anya showed up with Sid in tow. “Don’t,” Zhenya said to him as he passed, frowning in a way that he hoped was appropriately threatening. Ilyusha was nosy; Zhenya didn’t need him sniffing around.

He was worried that Sid might feel out of place, surrounded by people he didn’t know, and a language he didn’t speak. But he knew Ilyusha and Sasha, at least—and Zhenya sat him down next to Sasha on the plane and watched as he made fast friends with Kiril, mostly by using hand gestures and getting Sasha to translate. 

“He seems like he’s fitting in,” Anya said, elbowing him in the side, pulling her sunglasses up through her mane of hair. He could hear what she wasn’t saying—that Zhenya was stirring himself up over nothing—but also that she _wanted_ him to fit in, and was happy to see the signs. 

“Of course he is,” Zhenya whispered, watching Sid mime a high stick and then start laughing at himself. “He’s around hockey players. It’s always like this.” He wouldn’t admit to her that he _had_ still been worried about it. It seemed a little silly now. 

Maybe there was some chance that his other concerns were just as unfounded, but puzzling the answers out from observation didn’t seem to be offering him any relief. The way that Sid held his fork, or how many times he smiled, or whether he slept next to Zhenya or Anya or in the guest bedroom—none of it got him any closer to knowing what was in Sid’s heart.

///

He waited until after they’d all returned to Moscow, one morning after Anya left for the gym. They’d been put on baby duty until after lunch. Nikita and Anya had eaten before either he or Sid had gotten out of bed, and Nikita was napping now, passed out and drooling in his playpen in front of the television.

“Sid,” Zhenya said, and took a deep breath, switching off the kettle and rifling through the cupboard for some suitable tea. “Why you come?” The room was silent now, without the whistle of the kettle. Zhenya didn’t want to turn around. 

“Um,” Sid said, the syllable drawn out. “Well, you asked me, right?” Zhenya could hear him taking a sip of his coffee; the sound loud in Zhenya’s ears. 

“Why you say no?” Zhenya said, turning to face him, the canister of tea still open in his fist. “I ask, yes—and you say no, can’t talk, but then you here? You in Switzerland, Germany.” 

“I already had those plans, Geno,” Sid said, crossing his arms over his bare chest. God, Zhenya didn’t want to look at him. “I didn’t think you were serious, okay? But then you wouldn’t answer my texts, and Anna kept sending me updates and I’m like—he’s still alive, but he’s not fucking talking to me and I can’t fucking read his mind and—so I’m here, okay.” 

“So you only here because you think I’m mad?” Zhenya snapped. He was incensed. He had been asking Sid to come to Russia for years. He wanted Sid to want to do it all on his own. He didn’t want to have to—to spell it all out, make ultimatums.

“That’s not what I said,” Sid said.

“Why you think I’m not serious?” Zhenya said, because that felt like the whole root of it. Did Sid think Zhenya wasn’t serious because _he_ wasn’t serious? “Of course serious. But if you not think serious, okay, don’t need to come. I’m not show you home if you not want to see.” 

From the play pen, Nikita began to cry, fussing like they had awoken him. Zhenya chastised himself; probably it had been him who had risen his voice. Sid pinched the bridge of his nose, leaning against the counter. 

“Have to,” Zhenya said, excusing himself to go pull Nikita out of his pen and settle down together on the couch, bouncing him up and down. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, petting Nikita’s soft head. “Don’t tell your mom about it, okay?” Thank god he couldn’t really talk much yet, in fully coherent sentences; Zhenya didn’t need anyone to snitch. 

Sid left his place at the counter and walked down the hall, going into the guest bathroom and turning the tap on. When he came back out he was dressed and quiet, and his face was red and looked freshly scrubbed clean. Zhenya wrinkled his brow. Had he been crying? 

All of the anger that he’d had pent up while they had argued was deflated now, lying dormant again. Instead, he worried that perhaps he had been too harsh. He was hurt, certainly, but perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he was simply doing more to just push Sid away. 

He scooted over a bit on the couch to make room, and let Sid sit down next to them in silence, all of them fixated on the screen, some old re-run of Cheburashka, because Nikita loved the crocodile and liked to imitate him, running around and chomping at Zhenya’s knees. He squirmed off of Zhenya’s lap when Genya appeared on screen and wandered up to the TV to press both of his hands to it. 

“Nikita,” Zhenya chided. “Come back here, you’ll hurt your eyes.” 

“What is this?” Sid asked, the first thing he’d said since he’d reappeared, the conversation from earlier apparently closed. 

“Soviet cartoon,” Zhenya said, and got up when Nikita still wouldn’t move. “Nikita please—your mother doesn’t like it.” He scooped Nikita back in his arms like a small animal, and carried him squirming all the way back to the couch. “It’s silly,” he said to Sid. “It’s old, but I like.” 

“Mmm,” Sid said, spreading his legs wide on the couch, reaching over to ruffle Nikita’s hair. “I didn’t watch a lot of cartoons growing up.”

“I don’t watch, like, a _lot_ , but—“ Zhenya said. “It’s nice, like—remind me of home, and parents.”

“I think you’re home now,” Sid said. “You still need a reminder?” 

“Nikita likes, okay? Don’t complain, be quiet, we watch,” Zhenya said, bristling. He wasn’t sure if Sid was being critical or just making conversation. He had never been particularly interested in watching any Russian movies with Zhenya because he got tired easily, and didn’t like to read the screen. Anya never seemed to mind, and always curled up with Sid to binge watch Game of Thrones, Sid’s new favorite thing that he could talk about in the locker room. 

“I’m not complaining, Geno,“ Sid said, and then opened his mouth to say something more, but nothing came. They sat in silence like that for the rest of the program, and all the way until Anya came home from the gym, swanning in in her workout clothes. 

“Are you all still watching television?” she asked, moving things around in the kitchen and rooting noisily through her purse. “Have you moved at all?” 

“Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” Zhenya said, and patted Sid’s leg and got up, leaving him there on the couch with Nikita and Cheburashka and Gena the crocodile. He felt like his plan to clear some air this morning had only muddled it further, and now he was swimming in soup. 

Outside, he walked along Malaya Bronnaya Street to the neighborhood pond, and walked beside it, kicking stones and letting the wind ruffle his hair. There was an old woman on the bank selling trinkets, little ornaments shaped like toys and animals. He walked up to her stall and smiled at her, her kind wrinkled face, the mangy cat perched in her lap. 

“What’s its name?” Zhenya asked, rifling through the baskets of trinkets. 

“Koshka,” the woman answered. Zhenya laughed. It was the name he’d given to every stray cat in the neighborhood growing up. He wondered if her children had named it, or perhaps she had just never grown up. 

“The perfect name,” he told her, and smiled. As he went through another basket, he found a single ornament of interest: a small glass hockey stick. It looked like stained glass, painted bright swaths of yellow and white. “How much?” he asked, holding it up for inspection. 

He felt a little silly carrying it home in his pocket. Sid wasn’t really prone to big gestures, and he rarely remembered a birthday without a dedicated calendar reminder. Would he even want a gift? Maybe he would think that Zhenya was just trying to smooth things over, which wasn’t entirely untrue. 

When Zhenya got home, Sid and Anya were in the kitchen together, laughing about something over the sound of the running faucet. Zhenya stood in the hallway with his shoes in his hand and watched them for a moment: Anya’s face in profile, her small secret smile. She still had her hair piled high on top of her head from the gym. 

Sid was washing fruit in the sink. He had watery handprints all over the back of his shirt, no doubt from Anya’s hands. Zhenya was a little jealous, lately, of their easy relationship. Anya had been suspicious of Sid at first, the way she had been suspicious of a lot of people in North America. But she had warmed to him quickly—his easy-going nature, his listening ear, his kind heart. When Anya asked him to jump, he never questioned her. She loved him, just as Zhenya did. 

Did she know something about Sid that Zhenya had missed? He knew that love wasn’t a straight line, but lately it felt like Zhenya was just falling off a cliff, afraid to look back and see that no one was walking along behind. Surely all the things he had learned about Sid over the years didn’t add up to nothing. He was endlessly kind, sure, and passionate about his life and the people he loved. But his heart’s inner workings were obscured, a safe that Zhenya had never been able to crack. He didn’t talk about his feelings; they just were. Zhenya could assume the best or the worst at will. 

He had seen Sid leave someone before—all long-term relationships with women that Zhenya had been certain he would marry someday. Things were good, and then they were just amicably over, as if nothing had ever happened. He would bring them around less and less until it had been months and Zhenya would start wondering. He always told Zhenya that there were no hard feelings; if he’d mourned the losses, he hadn’t shown any sign at all. 

Zhenya felt increasingly paranoid that the same thing was happening to them now. Sid loved them, sure, but would it last? What did Zhenya and Anya have to offer him in the future? They would come back home to Moscow for good someday and nothing that Sid had done made Zhenya think he would be eager to follow. Even now, when Zhenya wanted to be able to think the best of Sid’s intentions for coming after all, Sid walked around him on eggshells, awkward with Zhenya like they hadn’t been in many years. 

Maybe he was here to let them down easy, and that was the explanation for his confusing behavior and his opaque motivations. Zhenya didn’t want Anya’s love to blind her to the possibility. He was worried that she would press her own worries and hurts down into a pulp, crushed beneath her steadfast determination for everything to be okay. He didn’t want her to get hurt, maybe more than he didn’t want to get hurt himself. 

Zhenya left them in the kitchen together and went down the hall to the master bedroom, where the bed was still unmade and everyone’s clothes were scattered together over the top of a chair, Anya’s shorts beside one of Zhenya’s jackets, with three of Sid’s identical grey t-shirts on top. Zhenya hoped it wasn’t the last he would see them here, all wound up together, an easy picture of daily domestic life. 

The small trinket was heavy in his pocket as he pulled off his socks and changed into his house clothes. It was silly of him to buy it. Maybe he would hang it up in his own home, hide it in the branches of his and Anya’s New Year’s tree. Thinking about giving it to Sid made his stomach burn—like he was giving some additional part of himself, something that Sid might not even want. 

He slid the ornament from his pocket and put it in the bedside drawer, tucked next to his extra power cords and a half empty bottle of hand lotion. From the kitchen, Anya and Sid were still laughing a little, in between bits of lingering quiet. Zhenya could hear them kissing if he strained his ear. 

Maybe he would lie down for a nap.

///

“Can you hand me that?” Anya asked, reaching out for the second hamper. Zhenya had stayed up too late and gotten roped into helping her finish the laundry. Nikita had been sleeping soundly for at least a few hours. Sid had heard the dryer dinging and shortly made his way to bed, yawning into his hand. Zhenya was at least seventy-five percent sure that Sid had been faking exhaustion. Sid was no dummy; he knew just how many clothes Anya had.

They folded in silence for a while. It was Zhenya’s job to match the socks, rolling them up tight into little balls. “Are you happy he came?” Anya asked him, after they’d completed a second hamper’s worth and moved on to a third. This was perhaps way too much laundry for three and a half people. Zhenya always forgot. 

“I don’t know,” Zhenya said, because he wanted Sid to come, sure, but the situation as it stood was just too complicated. “Did he tell you how long he’s staying?” 

“He didn’t,” she said, tossing another unmatched sock his way. “Does it matter? I’m sure however long he wants to stay is fine—I like having him here, Zhenya. It’s nice.” 

“Yeah,” Zhenya said, trailing off into nothing. He wanted very much to enjoy it as much as Anya was. “I’m worried he’s not happy, Nyusha—”

“Still?” Anya asked. She stopped her folding and turned to him, reaching a hand out to touch his arm. “You need to let that go, Zhenya. You’re making this into much more than it needs to be.” 

“Okay, sure, yes—it’s just me, all in my head,” he scoffed, feeling frustration bubbling up inside his stomach, suddenly much more incensed than he had been just moments ago. “Why won’t he move in with us? Why hasn’t he touched the Russian vocabulary book you bought him? I’m afraid of the future, Anya. I’m afraid it’s not real for him, not like it’s real for us.” 

“Do you think he would have come all this way for nothing, Zhenya? For something that’s not real?” Anya asked. 

“I don’t know—“ Zhenya said. He ran a hand back through his hair, pulling it up into thin tufts, tugging a little just to feel it. “I think—maybe it’s just convenient, like he said—or maybe it’s just. Maybe he’s testing it out, okay?”

“That doesn’t even make sense, Zhenya,” Anya said, shaking the sweatshirt in her hand out forcefully and folding it into a crisp square. “It sounds ridiculous.” 

“Ridiculous?” Zhenya asked. He was so frustrated. Anya had been dancing this dance for weeks, pretending like things were so rosy when all Zhenya wanted was for her to open up to him and share in his concerns. “How can you be so calm about all this? Do you really think it’s realistic to imagine that he would come here with us? In the future, if we came to stay?” 

“Well, why not?” Anya snapped, as if the answer were so simple. Like the love they all shared was just enough, the only thing they needed to carry them through. 

“He doesn’t like it here! He doesn’t like the food, the language is hard for him, all he wants to do is just—nothing! Stupid everyday things that we could do anywhere, the same things we do every day in North America,” Zhenya said. 

“What’s wrong with everyday things?” Anya asked, furrowing her brow at him. “Contrary to what you might think, I didn’t fall in love with you for your extravagant gestures, Zhenya. It wasn’t a tiger that convinced me to stay with you—it was just you.” 

Zhenya cracked just the barest hint of a smile. The tiger _had_ been a nice touch. But Zhenya couldn’t shake the feeling that their everyday just wouldn’t be enough in the end, just like Olivia’s hadn’t, or Samantha’s. Sid hadn’t wanted to move in with them either, stubbornly attached to his own house and his own life and his own normal. Maybe he didn’t want to integrate into Zhenya and Anya’s world because he knew he would leave it someday. 

“You know he had a girlfriend when you met him, right?” Zhenya said. He pushed the socks and the rest of the piles back toward the wall, and leaned heavily on the counter’s edge. “She was like—I was sure they were getting married eventually. And then it was just—I went from seeing her at every dinner, hanging around in the hall after the game to just, she wasn’t there anymore, and Sid barely seemed fazed.” 

“And you think that’s going to be us?” Anya asked, reaching out to take his hand, her face drawn with concern. “Oh, Zhenya.” She looked away from him for a moment, and covered her mouth with her arm, silent. Her face had been pink and blotchy throughout, but when she turned back, her eyelashes were misty. She wiped at them roughly and then returned shortly to her work, no doubt frustrated that Zhenya had seen the cracks in her veneer. 

“I can’t help it,” Zhenya said, feeling his anger seeping out like a balloon losing air, leaving only unease in its wake. “I want him to love us and stay with us, but—all I can see are the signs. Maybe I was testing him when I asked him to come with us this summer and he—he said no, Anya. What else are we supposed to see in that.” He felt himself tearing up a little himself, and he blinked rapidly through the salt stinging his eyes.

“I think you can see plenty of things,” Anya said, and let go of his hand and reached up to wipe at his face with her sleeve pulled down over her fingers. He resisted the urge to cry harder and more embarrassingly. “I want him to want to stay with us too, Zhenya. I know that I—I’m sorry that I’ve made you feel like it’s just you in there, fretting about it for both of us. But it’s hard sometimes. You’ve known him for so much longer than I have, and when you start to worry I think, well, maybe he’s right, you know? Maybe you know this secret thing, and I’m just naive for trying to hope for things to be okay.” 

Zhenya smiled weakly at her, and went forward into her arms. “You’re not naive,” Zhenya said. He knew that neither of them liked to be this vulnerable out loud, but Anya was very tough, probably the toughest person he knew, and she knew how to keep them upright. “I’m sorry for being such a sad sack,” he said into the thick mess of her hair. “It’s not very attractive.” 

“I’m attracted to you just fine,” Anya said, laughing. “Maybe next time you can cry for longer, though. You know I love a man who cries.” She was smiling at him when he pulled away to look at her, fond and terrible, his favorite kind of smile. 

Later, in the bathroom, Anya nudged him away from the sink to wet her toothbrush. “I was using that,” he said, and bumped her back, toothpaste foaming from his mouth and down his chin. 

“You’ll live,” Anya replied, and brushed her own teeth, and leaned down and rinsed her mouth directly from the tap before she spoke again. “You, know, even if I’m scared about it, I—” She wiped a stray bit of soap from his cheek and held her hand there, cool from the water. “I really do believe he’ll come around. Nothing in America was easy when I first came, Zhenya. All I wanted was my own food and my own bed in my old apartment, the women frowning at me in the shops, all of it. It was scary when you asked me to come, but I came because I loved you, and that was enough for me, in the end.”

“Yes, but he—“ Zhenya began. Sid had said _no_ , Zhenya and Anya’s love for him hadn’t been enough, then. 

“You can’t play tricks with him and expect him to understand how much you want something, Zhenya,” she said, “Maybe if you’re honest with him about it, he’ll surprise you. Did you really think I’d say yes when you asked me to leave Russia?” 

Zhenya had been nervous then, too. They had fought about it. He had been certain, down to his bones, that the answer would be no. And after how much of a struggle it had been to lure Anya to North America, he wasn’t hoping for another fight. “Well, no,” he said. “I guess not.” 

“There’s your answer, then,” Anya said, and kissed him quick, her hands on either side of his face. “I’m headed to bed, now. I’ll tell Sid that it’s his turn to feed the baby.” 

Zhenya laughed. Sid would never argue with something that Anya wanted him to do. “Goodnight, Nyusha,” he said, “I’ll be in soon.” He looked at himself in the mirror: his eyes were still a little red, and puffy from tears. 

He took a long breath, and let it fog up the mirror in front of him. Tomorrow was a new day.

///

Tomorrow came, and Zhenya drove Sid with him to the practice rink for a session with Zhenya’s trainer. The rink was a little ways south of the city center, out past the neat confectionary colors of downtown, surrounded by low-rise buildings with crumbling, mismatched faces.

“It’s like a whole different city out here,” Sid said, peering out the window at an opulent church tucked between two aging car dealerships, his travel mug cradled in his palms. Overhead, the power lines crisscrossed the sky with no apparent pattern. 

“Yes,” Zhenya said, and bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t say anything further, lest it be unkind. Moscow wasn’t all glitter and imperial museums. If Sid was surprised by this, then, well—there was no chance of hope for him in Magnitogorsk.

“Looks like Pittsburgh, a little,” Sid continued. And, well—that wasn’t negative. Sid loved Pittsburgh. Zhenya felt a small swoop of hope in his belly and he tried to encourage it. He would never work up the nerve to talk to Sid if he kept himself angry. 

“A little,” he said, and realized that he had nearly driven too far. He took a sharp left turn into the complex parking lot, nearly clipping the edge of the gate. 

Skating was easy and largely uneventful. They weren’t skating for very long hours this far out, and most of it was just simple drill work, a little stickhandling, some laps. Sid stuck closely to Zhenya, looping around behind him, following his lead. 

“What did he say?” Sid asked, sliding up beside him when Pasha called out the next drill. Pasha spoke only Russian, and plenty of words that were well beyond Sid’s vocabulary. 

“Crossover,” Zhenya explained, and sped up a little. “Just watch me.” 

Sid was happy on the ice, and happy in the gym afterward, jogging on the track and pushing the sled around, the muscles in his back shifting in a way that nearly prompted Zhenya to drop a kettlebell on his foot. 

In the car on the way home, Sid kept his face turned out the window again, watching the scenery pass him by. “Thanks,” he said. “For letting me tag along today. I’ve been itching to skate. Usually we’d be starting to ramp up right about now, back home.” 

“Sure,” Zhenya said, and turned onto the loop that would take them around the city, back home. “Glad you have fun.” 

They were both silent for another moment, until Sid spoke. “Are you gonna talk to me?” Zhenya could see him shifting out of the corner of his vision, facing Zhenya now, his eyes hard and inquisitive. Zhenya could feel his own heart beating triple time in his chest. 

“Am talking,” Zhenya said. He wasn’t really ready to get real about this. He had been planning on giving his thoughts another few days to marinate, while he tried to give Sid an honest chance. 

“Don’t, Geno, c’mon,“ Sid said. “I know you’re pissed that I didn’t just drop everything and run away to Russia with you guys this summer, okay? I get it. But I’m here now, and I want to—Anna is acting like nothing is wrong, and you’re hot and cold and—I don’t know what to—what did I _do_?”

Zhenya rarely heard Sid get this huffed up, his voice high and frustrated, his posture tense. When Zhenya glanced at him at the next stoplight, he had his hat pulled low, and his lips pressed tight together: a sharp line. “You don’t—I don’t know what you want, okay? You come here, okay, fine. But you don’t want to do Russian thing, you only want—everyday thing, normal thing, stay at home, make food, skate,” Zhenya said. He pulled up to a stop sign and hit the brake harder than was probably necessary. “I want you to like, Sid—I want—maybe someday we move here, you know? And what you do then? When hockey not there to make you happy? You stay home, read book, get homesick and leave? We don’t want, okay.” 

“Why do you think I’m going to—“ Sid said, and then went silent for a moment before he continued. “You think I’m going to leave you? I don’t get it.” 

Zhenya felt himself getting too tense to drive, and he pulled off the road into an overgrown parking lot, abandoned to the weeds, tucked behind a block of old apartment buildings. He shut off the car. 

“I know you so long, okay—“ Zhenya said, keeping his hands on the steering wheel, facing straight ahead. He didn’t want to look at Sid’s face. “I see you with Olivia and it’s like—it’s so good, I think it’s forever for you and then it’s just not work—and it’s so good with me and Anya, you so good for us, important, we want forever but—you don’t want to give up house, and you don’t learn Russian and don’t want spend summer and I. Anya thinks maybe I’m worry too much, but—maybe it’s me, you know? We not good enough, and maybe you not serious. It’s just fun for you, not like—future.” 

His knuckles were clenched almost white on the steering wheel as he held his breath, waiting for Sid’s reply. Sid’s face was red when he glanced at it, flushed all over like it was when he was embarrassed. “You’re not silly,” Sid said. Zhenya’s heart dropped all the way into his lap. He raised a hand to his mouth to bite, afraid that if he didn’t he might cry, again, for the second time this week.

“No, fuck, I—“ Sid said, and he undid his seatbelt and shuffled closer, his hand on Zhenya’s knee. Zhenya wanted desperately to flinch away, but he was trapped. He couldn’t escape into the apartment because they weren’t home. He would have to listen to this and then drive all the way home with Sid in the car, the single most awkward ride of his whole existence. He would have to break it to Anya. Fuck. “Geno, please—let me explain, okay. I didn’t mean—“ 

Zhenya knew that Sid could tell that he was unhappy; it was rolling off him in thick, choking waves. His heart was like a rabbit’s. “I didn’t know you felt that way, Geno,” Sid began, speaking slowly, his voice a little tentative and then growing louder. “Anna asked me to move in with you and I thought she was joking, okay? I thought you were joking when you asked me to come spend the summer with you—not that you, not that you were joking, I guess, but that—I didn’t think it was a real question, okay? It was maybe two days before you left! Who plans like that?” 

“I plan!” Zhenya said, throwing his hands up. Sid had known him for over a decade; he couldn’t believe that he was somehow so unknown to Sid after all that time. Zhenya knew that people thought he was an open book, even if he knew himself that many pages were hidden beneath. Surely Sid had read some emotion into his request. 

“I don’t—I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to be here, okay? I do,” Sid said, and reached up to grab Zhenya’s hand, which Zhenya very hesitantly let him hold between them, suspended over the gear shift. “But you're not the only one who worries about the future, okay? Anna is always so cavalier about it, and you just change the fucking subject and who knows what’s going to happen, you know? You guys are just gonna come back here in ten years and what then? You’re really just going to want me hanging around?” 

“Yes!” Zhenya said. Did Sid really think they didn’t love him enough for that? He was ridiculous. Zhenya’s own face burned a little, to think that his and Sid’s concerns were in a way just a mirror of each other, a face staring at itself through the glass. “Don’t care if you lay around on couch forever, do nothing, but—we want you to come, be with us, love Russia, spend time. It’s not just—we don’t just want for season okay, it’s not like, it’s not just fun—it’s real.” 

Maybe the future was unknown and scary. Ten years was a long time to plan ahead for. Maybe Zhenya would want to retire instead to Miami and never leave and they would have to have the same tentative conversations to lure Sid south, out of his comfort zone. But Zhenya wanted it, whatever unknown future Sid would give them. 

“It’s real to me too, okay,” Sid said, rubbing his thumb over Zhenya’s tense knuckles. “I want that.” Zhenya looked in his eyes then, shaded under the brim of his cap. They were smiling, small and crinkled up at the corners, full of new and tentative hope. Zhenya’s own eyes were wet, because his body was awful and betrayed him for the soft-hearted boy he was inside. 

“You going to tell Anya?” Zhenya asked, and held onto Sid’s hand tighter. Zhenya didn’t want to explain, or he would cry again. Anya had dried enough of his tears. 

“I will,” Sid said, and looked out the window at the empty lot, and the empty alleyway beyond. There were no cars driving by; Zhenya’s tinted windows shielded them from view. Sid leaned in and kissed him, still holding his hand in a vise grip, his other hand anchored on Zhenya’s wet cheek, the same way that Anya’s always was. “I’ll tell her,” he said when he pulled back. His lips were shiny, and pulled up in a small, hopeful smile.

///

There was a large pot of soup simmering away on the stove when they got back, filling the whole apartment with savory steam. Zhenya didn’t see Anya anywhere, and he left Sid in the front hall and wandered through the apartment in search of her, calling her name.

“I’m out here, Zhenya,” she called from the balcony. “Could you be any louder, really?” She was out there in Zhenya’s reading lounger, in shorts and a cropped sweatshirt, feeding the baby. He leaned in the doorway and watched her for a moment, smiling. 

“Good morning?” she asked, like she could see it splashed across his face, his newly sprouted hopes and dreams, the wet sheen of Sid’s kiss. 

“I talked with him, Nyusha,” Zhenya said, smiling. He had told Sid to tell her himself, but he couldn't help himself. The future wasn’t all worked out, but it was there now, sliding slowly into view. 

“Oh,” Anya said, and put the bottle down and readjusted Nikita in her arms, propping him up on her lap. “And?” 

“I’ve been a bit silly, perhaps—I,” Zhenya said, unsure how to boil this down into something simple. Perhaps he should go and get Sid now, who had promised that Zhenya wouldn’t have to be the one to re-hash this, but he was already in neck deep. “He wants to stay with us, Anya—he wants to try.” 

“Well, then,” Anya said, and smiled her own smile, proud and brimming with relief. She stood up with Nikita in her arms, wobbling a little as he dove toward Zhenya and screamed at him in greeting. 

“Here, take him,” Anya transferred Nikita to Zhenya’s arms, and he nestled immediately into the curve of Zhenya’s neck. He still smelled sweet, like all babies seemed to. “Is Sid inside? Come on.” 

She was sweetly eager, dragging Zhenya back through the bedroom and down the hall into the kitchen again, where Sid was sitting at the counter, shuffling through a stack of takeout menus they kept in a basket on the counter’s edge. Zhenya wanted to laugh at her a little. Her excitement now clearly betrayed her own hidden concerns, the very concerns that Zhenya had read in her from the start. 

“Hi,” Sid said, when they came in. He pushed the takeout menus off to one side. “What’s for lunch?” The pot was still bubbling away on the stove. It smelled sour. Zhenya walked over and lifted the lid. 

“It’s solyanka,” Zhenya said. “Can order out, maybe—don’t know if you like.” That unsure, nervous feeling returned. Maybe they had some sandwich fixings in the fridge; he didn’t want to feel fussy with Sid so soon after their hopeful conversation. 

“I’ve never had that,” Sid said, and hopped off his chair and came around the counter to the stove, laying a quick kiss to Anya’s cheek on the way. He put his hand on Zhenya’s side as he peered into the open pot. “Smells good. Why don’t we give it a try?” 

Zhenya and Anya shared a quiet glance over the top of Sid’s head. “Okay,” Anya said, and shuffled them out of the kitchen and out into the dining area with a towel. “Let’s eat, c’mon. Get bowls.” 

They fixed Nikita into his highchair and deposited some cereal on his tray and sat down to eat, all three of them circled around one end of the large dining table. Nikita crumbled his cereal noisily.

Zhenya watched Sid stir his soup a few times and didn’t breathe, and felt silly watching him blow across the spoon and raise it to his mouth to take a bite. When he looked at Anya, she was just as focused on it, her face like stone. 

“You guys gonna eat?” Sid asked, mouth half full of another spoonful, talking around a hunk of sour beef. His brow was furrowed at them, as if they had grown five new heads. 

“You like?” Anya asked, and dunked her own spoon into her bowl. 

“It’s good,” Sid said, and swallowed his mouthful and took another bite and then another. “You think you have enough for seconds?” 

“Yes,” Anya said, and leaned over to pick up some of the cereal that Nikita had thrown onto the tabletop. “Of course, eat as much as you like.” 

Zhenya picked up his spoon and smiled.

///

“Maybe we go out tomorrow,” Anya said, looking up from her tablet. She had been reading Zhenya’s business emails on the couch, humming to herself while Zhenya and Sid passed a carton of ice cream back and forth between their laps. It was strawberry: Zhenya’s favorite. “Sid, you like go to museum, right? There’s modern art museum nearby, maybe. Collection is big, I like, it’s cool.”

Sid shoved a big spoonful of ice cream into his mouth, so big that he had to chew through it. Silence fell around the room; only the low hum of the evening news filtered through the background. “Um,” he said, once his mouth was empty, “Not that I’m not open to it, but—I wasn’t joking before when I said that I just wanted to do regular stuff, you know? What do you guys normally do on a Thursday? You go to museums?” He ran a hand over his face and up into his hair. Zhenya reached over and snatched the ice cream carton back, to eat it before it melted from the ambient heat of Sid’s skin. 

“Sometimes,” Anya said. “If you don’t like is okay, we find something.” 

“Let’s just stay in,” Sid said. He looked over at Zhenya and then back at Anya, his gaze soft. “I don’t want to feel like I’m a guest, okay? I just want—if this is home, I want it to feel like that, you know? I want to be part of the—part of the family, I guess.” 

Anya set her tablet down. The spoon of ice cream that was halfway to Zhenya’s mouth began to drip all over his lap. “Sid—” Anya said, and climbed down onto the floor, pressing Sid in between them. 

“Of course you family,” Zhenya said. He dumped the ice cream carton and the spoon on the coffee table and grabbed Sid’s chin in his hand. “Why you think?” 

“I just don’t want you to feel like you have to parade me around, okay? You don’t need to try to impress me,” Sid said, and then laughed a little, grin shifting his face in Zhenya’s palm. “I’m not that hard to impress.” 

Zhenya kissed him then, his pink-lipped grin. His hands slid up Sid’s jaw and into his hair, tangling in the back where it had grown a little long, the way it did mid-season when he was too lazy to get it cut. Zhenya coaxed Sid’s mouth open further, licking in where his tongue was still cool from dessert. 

“Don’t be greedy, Zhenya,” Anya said in Russian. Zhenya could feel her hands on Sid’s sides, crawling up his ribs where he was tender and ticklish. After a moment, he began to laugh into Zhenya’s mouth, and kept laughing as Anya pulled him away and laid a dramatic, showy kiss on him herself, scratching her manicure down the back of his neck until it bloomed pink. 

“Want to impress, Sid. Want you to like,” Zhenya said, returning to their earlier conversation. He desperately wanted Sid to like it here. He wanted to be happy with Sid and Anya for the rest of his life, but maybe just as much, he wanted Sid to be happy in Russia, in the place that Zhenya loved and sometimes missed like it was part of him, a phantom limb. “It’s not just show off, you know? Want you to like Russia because it’s us, Sid. It’s not just place that’s far away. Someday maybe it’s home, for you.” 

“Want you to see best parts,” Anya told him, sliding her hand over the curve of his knee. “Most exciting things.” 

Sid looked between them and scratched a hand through his hair. “It’s probably pretty cheesy, but I—” he said. “Just being with you guys. That’s the best part, for me.” 

Zhenya tucked his face into the warm curve of Sid’s neck, his cheeks flaming. “Sid—” he groaned. 

“I said it was cheesy, okay,” Sid said, and laughed. He nodded to the discarded ice cream on the table. “Pretty sure that thing is done for, eh?” When Zhenya looked, it was sweating into a lake of condensation. He was glad that table was glass and he wouldn’t get scolded for leaving a ring.

“We’re pretty worried,” Anya said from the couch, as Zhenya and Sid took the mess into the kitchen to clean. Zhenya stood at the sink and splashed water over the sticky ice-cream glob on his pants until it seeped through to his skin. 

“ _You_ were worried?” Sid said, turning back to her, snorting in disbelief. “I could tell something was up with him because well, something’s always a little up with this guy.” He reached back blindly to pat Zhenya on the hip, the touch familiar, one he’d been giving Zhenya in the locker room for more than ten years. “But you sure had me fooled.” 

“Maybe I hide little better,” Anya said. Zhenya finished drying his hands off on his shirt and watched from the kitchen as Sid came over to Anya on the couch, threading his hands through her hair fanned out over the back of the cushions. “I’m tough, more tough than Zhenya,” she said, just loud enough for Zhenya to hear from the adjoining room. Zhenya watched her raise her head and smile up at him and say. “Not want to scare you, want you feel home here, be happy.” 

“Don’t worry,” Sid said, and leaned down over the back of the couch to kiss her on her upturned chin. “I’m pretty happy.”

///

Sid stayed for two more weeks before meetings and business in North America called him back, and Anya and Zhenya reluctantly let him book a return flight, hovering over him on the couch while he fiddled with the options on his laptop.

“Leave on first,” Anya said, reaching past him to click the trackpad. 

“Oh, you’re in charge now, eh?” Sid asked, but he smiled and listened to her anyway. They all knew she was in charge. It was no secret. 

The morning before he left was Zhenya’s thirty-second birthday, and he woke in the morning dark to laughter, Sid’s and Anya’s and Nikita’s all blended together, spilling out through the hall. He was alone in bed, and he closed his eyes and feigned sleep, happy to let them get away with their surprise: eating cake in bed together, Nikita’s chubby hands smeared with frosting. Sid had some in the front of his hair. Anya couldn’t stop smiling. 

“Happy birthday to me,” he said, lying around with Anya and Sid at midday. He was terribly full of cake by now. He’d eaten two slices, mostly at Anya’s behest. Nikita had been put down for a nap and all three of them were in bed together, lazing on top of the covers. True birthday sloth. 

“You still glad you come?” Anya asked, flipping over onto her side and carding her hand through Sid’s hair. 

“Of course,” Sid said, “It’s been—it’s been really nice. The best summer I’ve had in a while.” Zhenya burned through with happiness. He put his phone game away and rolled on top of Sid and kissed him. 

“Maybe you come back next year,” Zhenya said, and leaned in and kissed him again, deeper this time, swiping his tongue through Sid’s mouth that still tasted like vanilla cake. “Maybe you come every year.” He was greedy; he wanted Sid forever, now that they had him.

“Every year, eh?” Sid laughed, biting Zhenya’s lower lip and squirming out from under him until they were both sitting up. “Maybe you guys can come home with me next summer. You think Nikita would like the lake? There’s good fishing.” 

“He would love,” Anya said. “He loves to swim. My little fish.” 

“Maybe he’ll be a swimmer when he grows up,” Sid said, smiling, leaning back on his hands, his shorts undone. He looked big and tan from lying on the balcony with Anya, and beautiful. Zhenya loved him so much. He wanted to talk for a thousand years about the future. 

“Maybe he will,” Anya said, and got up and went into the bathroom for a moment. Zhenya watched her as she went. 

“He need something for summer, when no hockey,” Zhenya said, flopping down to the bed again, right in front of Sid’s folded knees. “I think maybe ball hockey is good, but—maybe swimming okay, too.” He smirked wolfishly up at Sid, feeling warm all over, down to his toes. He and Anya had been in contention about Nikita’s future sporting career since before he was born. Zhenya was glad now to have another opinion to add to his obviously superior side. 

Anya scoffed from the bathroom, and rinsed her hands under the tap. “No hockey,” she called, over the sound of the spray. 

Zhenya laughed softly into the curve of Sid’s calf. Sid put one of his hands into Zhenya’s hair. She would fold in time. 

“What’s that?” Sid asked, after a moment. Zhenya looked up to see the ornament he’d bought weeks ago, sitting there on the bedside table next to his phone. He’d shuffled through the drawers this morning and forgotten to put it back. 

“Oh, um—“ he said, and sat up and reached over Sid to grab it and place it in his hands. “It’s gift, for you. I buy before we talk and think maybe I not give to you. It’s stupid, but.” 

“I like it,” Sid said, holding it up to watch it glitter in the light, turning it back and forth. 

“Maybe you put on your tree, Sid,” Anya said, coming back from the bathroom and climbing back into bed, her hands on Sid’s knees. “Little piece of Russia with you, in your home.” 

“Oh,” Sid said. Anya kissed his cheek, and then held his face in her delicate hands and kissed his mouth. Zhenya loved to watch them. Maybe they would have time for more before Nikita awoke. When Anya released him, Sid worried his lip for a moment and then spoke again, the ornament clutched in his palm. “I was actually thinking maybe, um—maybe we could talk about living together again, in the fall.” 

Zhenya’s heart was beating so fast that he thought it might beat right out of his chest. He watched Anya raise her eyebrows in surprise. Sid had been essentially living with them for half the season, sleeping in between them in bed and kicking Zhenya in his sleep half the time, even though he refused to admit it. Zhenya wanted him forever, for real—he wanted those stupid bruises on his calves when he was sixty. He wanted to lie on the couch and listen to Sid and Anya bicker about where all of the groceries went for the rest of time. 

“I don’t think it would be too hard to sell my place, right? New build, could probably leave some of it pretty furnished,” Sid kept talking until Anya kissed him again, his words muffled into her mouth. 

“Shh,” she said, when she pulled back. She grabbed Zhenya’s hand and held it, resting together on the place where Sid’s legs were crossed. “It’s easy, we help, don’t worry.” 

“Oh, you’ll help, eh?” Sid said. He left the ornament discarded on the bedspread and dragged them both down until they were all in a tangle again, the way they had begun the day. “You wanna carry my shit for me? Malkin Family Movers?” 

“You not funny,” Zhenya said, putting his palm over Sid’s sweet mouth, even though it was a little funny. Zhenya would never admit it. 

“Come live with us,” Anya reiterated. “Stay forever, I buy groceries for you, we put new ornament on New Year tree. It’s home.” 

“Okay,” Sid said. Zhenya had a wicked sunburn, and a stomachache from breakfast. But they were all warm together, sweaty and half-dressed in the summer heat in their bed. Somewhere in the other room, Nikita was swaddled up tight and fast asleep. Zhenya wanted his future to look just like this, this exact moment. “I think I’d like that.”


End file.
